Linda Bonanno's Weblog

Thought that title would catch your attention. I found it in this New York Times article about learning how to think. The basic gist of the article is that we listen too much to “experts” and those experts are all to often wrong. The author supposes that is why financial experts were able to lead the US into the state of affairs we are now in. The funny thing is that studies show that there actually is an inverse correlation between the amount of fame that an expert has garnered and how often they are right. Experts that are more famous are ones that journalists can count on to have strong opinions and clear coherent presentation of those very black and white opinions. They are great for a sound bite.

The article references a professor at the University of California, Berkeley – Dr. Philip Tetlock. Full disclosure, I haven’t read his book that was referenced in this article.

“Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t. “

This resonated with me because in engineering there are a lot of people that believe in logic and believe in black and white thinking as the way to solve problems. For many years I was one of those engineers. You were RIGHT or you were WRONG. You got it or you didn’t. It was important to be opinionated in order to be respected. Debates turned into religious wars. Those who were confident and had the ability to fluently articulate their point of view could bully the less confident into decisions that often turned out to be bad ones.

I’ve been in the industry for a long time. The funny thing is that the longer I am in engineering the more I doubt my ability to make those snap decisions. I haven’t gotten into a flame war in a very long time. I want to make sure to listen to the voices that are normally silenced by the louder and more confident. Sometimes it take a lot of effort to get those opinions out. They do take much longer for the owner to synthesize and rationalize. Just because someone isn’t fast on their feet and isn’t able to pin down what is bothering them right there on the spot doesn’t mean that their gut feeling isn’t valid. Many times it is really important. Without that perspective bad decisions can be made.